Fear

You hear a lot of fear flying around, mostly in advertising and often in religious institutions. I almost wrote "fear flying around these days", but this tactic is nothing new. Since we started roasting those first chestnuts on an open fire in the forest, we as humans have used the potentiality of negative results to deter, or motivate, others to do the way we'd like. Try it with a toddler, it works. With most, anyway. In fact, you can tell a lot about the basic nature of that toddler through this interaction. Tell him or her the stove is hot and hurts, and watch if they obey the fear in their mind or not.

This kind of fear is good. I have all my limbs and basic facial features intact because my parents did a good job of instilling in me a healthy fear of hot stoves or busy intersections. Religion and modern media take what they would also label "healthy" fear to new heights.

Take Exodus 20:18 from the Bible for example:

"When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, 'Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die."


That's pretty heavy, man. But check out that nice convenient veil the Bible puts between God and men. The men are too busy shaking in their boots to question who they should be listening too.

Take the media. Not to mention any names here; Glenn Beck you stupid-fucking-idiot soul-succubus, but the media will use terms like "Nazi", "terror", or "blood-shed", over and over until poor Grandma who doesn't realize the 24-hour news cycle will rot your brain thinks the world is only full of danger and gosh darnit', she better get her nightly news to know where the bad guys are! For the record, my grandmas are way cooler than that.

Here's a headline from CNN.com this morning:

"One Business Growing in Haiti -- Coffins"

Are you kidding me? Instead of mentioning that cholera deaths in Haiti are rising, CNN conjures up an image of a bustling coffin and grave industry, bursting at the seams 'cause there just so many of them Haitians dying all the time, they're piling up down there!

Send me a comment about Fox News, Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh and you'll find out how a blog explodes. I don't know technically how, yet, but it can't be fun. But notice I loped those liberals at CNN in the group too, nobody is above it, because fear tactics simply work too well. So then it goes without mention that everybody out there has to wade through the B.S. and find their news and information from a scientific and an unbiased (as possible) media outlet.

But there's another kind of fear, conditioned by the constant barrage of the above factors, which plays out in our minds all day. Since we've just shown that we live in a culture of fear, it follows that our personal worlds might be filled with the same kind of thinking.

When I stumble up the stairs in the morning, looking for breakfast, and choose between an apple and a pair of Twinkies I make a couple hundred or thousand minute, sub-conscious choices. One that I let surface to my groggy morning ego (something very hard to control in the morning) is that apple's help prevent lung cancer. My grandfather died of lung cancer, boy am I afraid of and fear cancer, and therefore should eat an apple.

Again this is good fear playing out and ultimately helps me make a healthy choice. The trouble comes when we try and apply this direct logic to our big life choices, choices significantly larger than apples v. Twinkies. When thinking about leaving your job right before a promotion to start a business, does fear play in? You bet. Fear about losing financial security, your mortgage, a failing entrepreneurial business...

The truth is that there is no truthful, objective way to account for what will happen in the future, and in reality, only you can work hard to augment the potential outcome. In other words, if I'm thinking of leaving the Corporation Corp. to start a company that designs beer-bottle-cap-cabinets then fear might highly dissuade me from doing so. But this fear is unfounded. It shouldn't deter you and given that this is our ONE life, our one chance, a secure pension plan won't ease regrets about unfulfilled life dreams.

Fear plays into music in two ways. First, when playing live improvisational music... you must forget it exists! Fear has no place in life or music. The micro-second you begin to second guess yourself because of fear about whether what you're about to play will sound "good" or not, ruins the note before it even leaves your fingers or lips.

Second, when pursuing a career in music, you have to be fearless. It's the only way. Fearing an outcome is tantamount to failure. A close relative of mine, very close, who I love, recently told me I need to "rethink my situation" or something to the effect that playing music full time isn't a real job. It makes my mind want to explode. Makes me mental. Drives me bananas down bat-shit crazy-street backwards!

WHEN DID WE MOVE FROM A WORLD WHERE MUSIC WAS AN INTEGRAL PART OF SOCIETY TO PASSABLE DIGITAL NUMBERS, ITEMS AS USABLE AND DISPOSABLE AS HANDBAGS???

We are in love with artists one minute, unable to stay interested because they only release a limited amount of pre-fab music and then Justin Beiber's voice changes, Britney goes to jail for nose candy and teenagers are apt (or forced for lack of options) to fall in love with their parent's music. Why don't they have their own music, music they can grow old along WITH?

The answer is as complex as explaining away any post-recession industry, but fear played into it, big time. Major labels feared investment in new talent, feared new technologies like Napster and now we have a system where those without fear, the heavy hitters starting technology companies, control the money game. Take Twitter, Pandora, Spotify or Grooveshark. These are the new DJ's of the current century, controlling the game.

So until I plan my technology start-up (we did get in pretty balls-deep with Mountain Side Mardi Gras ) I have to maintain that mindset of an artist which has guided and shielded us since troubadours traveled around France in the 13th century. We do what we do not for the money, but for love, which is the opposite of fear. We don't fear the outcomes of existing in an industry long forsaken for it's profitability. Playing music in the name of love is not some hipster, hippy, or beatnik expression but a protection from the fear in the world. Silence is ignorance, leading to fear and even hate in the worst case. But music, those first few notes you hear at a concert, penetrate that emptiness with light and love and substance. Fear has no room.

Maybe I have with music the same relationship some people feel they have with God, a protectionist sense of love, like that with a father, which can obliterate fear.

I sat next to a very, very wise man on a flight to New York a couple weeks ago. He's a leading cancer researcher at CSU and a Hindu-born Christian. If a preacher tries to preach to me, I will not listen, just like no one wants to hear a car mechanic go on about transmissions in their spare time. But if a scientist wants to take a crack at explaining, logically, to me his way of seeing religion in the world, I'm all ears.

He had one phrase which he kept repeating throughout his vast descriptions of religion (Eastern and Western) and how it relates to everyday life: "Live a simple and sincere life, and you will be like a humble lion."

As someone who is surrounded by lots of public attention as part of what they do for a living, that advice is immeasurably valuable. A lion fears nothing in the jungle.


*A few days after I started this post, WikiLeaks.org caused fear to ripple through the world's powerful and elite, posting their personal comments about adversaries and allies alike as if they were Facebook comments about your best friend's boyfriend. You didn't want him to find out you think he's a sleaze-ball and now damage control is the name of the game. Although Julian Assange is most likely a meglo-maniac, harmful to US interest, the story is just so novel, so massive in scope, the media has embraced his image and mission.